Day 5

Today I went to McDonalds and my friends got food and drinks but all I wanted was water and the only water they had was in water bottles and due to this project I couldn't buy one or drink from one. So I had to wait till one of my friends had finished their drinks so I could bring it back to school and fill it up and finally drink from it. It was extremely inconvenient that I couldn't bring the water around with me in my bag and I had to eventually throw out my McDonald's cup. If I can't even survive without something as little as water bottles I don't understand how Colin Beaven and his family survived without all those things.

Day 1

It's always easy to say your going to quit something or to stop using something until you actually have to give it up. It's only been a couple of days that I should have given up water bottles. It's so easy to forget, everytime I'm thirsty I just reach for my water bottle and when that water bottle is done I unknowingly go and get another one, later realizing I'm not supposed to use water bottles and if I did I was supposed to refill them. Water bottles are convenient their easy to bring around, easy to buy when needed, in some places you don't have the luxury to refill your water bottle.

Statement of Intent

Colin Beavan, his wife, his 2 – year old daughter, and his dog live in the middle of New York City and are attempting to live without making any net impact on the environment. Therefore no trash, no carbon emissions, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no toilets, etc. His purpose for this experiment was to show the world they could improve the quality of life and to end harm to the planet. Beavan’s No Impact Man motion is not something everyone can pursue, but from watching his documentary, we can at least try and adjust one thing in our lives. For the “No Impact” summative, I plan to give up using water bottles for the next three weeks. I will be using a designated water bottle and refilling it with water instead of opening a new one. I figured this would be most beneficial to reduce my carbon footprint since water bottles would be the main cause of my environmental unfriendliness. My family consumes an extraordinary amount of water bottles. We use water bottles as our main source of drinking water, we do not use tap and water is basically what we drink all the time. According to a 2001 report of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), roughly 1.5 million tons of plastic are expended in the bottling of 89 billion liters of water each year. Besides the number of plastic bottles produced each year, the energy required to manufacture and transport these bottles to market severely drains limited fossil fuels. Bottled water companies, due to their unregulated use of valuable resources and their production of billions of plastic bottles have presented a significant strain on the environment. Americans buy more bottled water than any other nation in the world, adding 29 billion water bottles a year to the problem. In order to make all these bottles, manufactures use 17 million barrels of crude oil. That’s enough oil to keep a million cars going for a year. To produce one bottle of water, it took a quarter bottle of oil. For every six water bottles we use, only one makes it to the recycling bin, the rest are sent to landfills, or even worse end up as trash on the land and in rivers, lakes, and the oceans, these water bottles take hundreds of years to disintegrate. Recycling one plastic bottle can save enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for six hours. In my house, we recycle every bottle we use, and if a bottle has water in it but we don’t know how long that water bottle has been opened we pour it in the garden instead of wasting it down the drain. My family could not live without water bottles and neither can I, but for this summative I have to put my feelings aside and go through with it alone. The rules are fairly simple, I will re-use one of the water bottles previously opened and keep filling it up, if by chance that water bottle gets thrown out I will find another opened bottle and I will try and get steel bottle, or the plastic refillable ones. Getting through these 3 weeks is going to be pretty hard since there are water bottles everywhere I look, but I need to prove for this class, that if Colin and his family can go through what they did and prove a point to the world and themselves then it is worth it.